What is Alberto Gonzales hiding?

Alberto Gonzales' recent Senate testimony was a remarkable display of (pick one or more): dishonesty, stupidity, incompetence. Here are some highlights from Talking Points Memo:



The Democrats are now asking for an special counsel to look into whether Gonzales has committed perjury, especially during an exchange in which he claimed that the disagreements among top Justice Department officials that led to the March 2004 visit to John Ashcroft at his hospital bed were not over the Terrorist Surveilance Program (aka warrantless wiretapping) but over a different program. That claim was contradicted by Robert Mueller's testimony yesterday.

Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel look into this issue at Talking Points Memo, and I think I finally understand what's going on (maybe). It looks to me like Gonzales was not lying in this exchange - rather, he was covering up the existence of a much broader surveillance program that existed up to the March 2004 hospital meeting. In a nutshell, it looks like in October 2001 the Bush Administration established a wideranging surveillance program that was put together by people close to - naturally - Dick Cheney's office, that John Ashcroft rubberstamped without looking into it very carefully. John Yoo resigned as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in June 2003 and was replaced by Jack Goldsmith, who appointed James Comey as his deputy to replace Larry Thompson (someone bring me an organizational chart!). Goldsmith and Thompson looked into the program and presented information about it that Thompson and Yoo had kept from Ashcroft, and Ashcroft was so alarmed that he refused to reauthorize the program. Eventually much of the senior staff at the Justice Department, including Ashcroft, threatened to resign unless the program was terminated. So eventually major changes were made to the program and it was reauthorized. The program's existence was later brought to the attention of the New York Times and exposed as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Summarizing this history, "a TPM reader" writes:

What to make of this long narrative? Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected. When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again. So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.

All right, so Gonzales' statement that the hospital meeting did not concern the TSP but another program could be construed as truthful, to the extent that the TSP supplanted this earlier program. And Mueller's statement that the meeting was about the TSP could also be true, under the interpretation that the TSP program was simply a modified version of the earlier program.

I hope that while they're looking into whether Gonzales committed perjury, they're also looking into exactly what this earlier program was all about. How severe do the violations of civil liberties have to be to get even John Ashcroft to threaten to resign? What exactly was the Bush Administration doing with our phone calls and emails from October 2001 to March 2004?